Merry Mythmas

I use to write X-mas merely as shorthand. On box lids. In emails. On greeting cards.
Then the war started. I don’t remember when it began. The body count hasn’t risen above zero since it started. But I’m being told that little baby Jesus is being maliciously attacked every year by laser-guided uranium-tipped lexicon missiles.

Since when did Christ (and more specifically the arbitrary date of his birth) need all this defending? If I saw Jesus on the street and wished him Happy Holidays, would he really smite me with a bolt of lighting that zigzagged down from the clouds, burning my soulless, heathen body to a crisp? Aren’t there more important things to worry about? Helping the needy. Fighting the AIDS epidemic. Getting our troops home safely.

If I’m at war with anything, it’s with conspicuous consumerism, pepper spraying people in the face to get a kid’s toy, saying Christmas belongs to Christ while maxing out credit cards. Disney on Ice.

Now days, I don’t wish people Merry Christmas, or Merry X-mas, or Happy Holidays, or Happy Kwanza, or Good Yule, or Happy Chanukah. I wish people Merry Mythmas (thank you, Bill Maher). For the myth that buying things for your loved ones is the measure of how much you care. For the myth that a tree decorated with small lights and cheap, plastic ornaments is somehow a Christian tradition. For the myth of a virgin birth.

I say Merry Mythmas for the mythical war on Christmas—we have enough real wars with real body counts already.

I had to recalibrate my mind after rejecting the very faith (the very meaning of my existence) that exhorted my yearning to love and be loved as an abomination. I had to process the isolation and self-hatred of being a gay man in the military during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

I had to navigate depression, suicidal ideation, and a life void of purpose.

So I cultivated and nurtured my own purpose. I studied fiction and philosophy.

I merged the two into a novel. I lived and breathed and took witness through five characters, woven together into a single narrative.

The five characters are based on the five existential archetypes outlined in Simone du Beauvoir’s, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

The Nihilist
The Sub-human
The Adventurer
The Serious Man
The Passionate Man

I’ll leave you philosopher lovers out there to figure out which character belongs to which existential archetype.

Writing this book saved my life. It’s a pretty good read, too!

My First Novel: Remnants of Light

Just a guy trying to be creative before I’m kicked off this spinning spaceship suspended in a vast void.

Why photography?

We’re forever locked within a specific set of limited perceptions and spatial relationships. This vision we enjoy is defined by cells stacked in the eye. These cells only absorb and process a small portion of the entire spectrum of light.

We see so little of what is truly out there.

I try to use the camera to deviate from those familiar perceptions, to reframe those spatial spaces, to expose thin slices of time that change our relation to experiences teaming with unknowns, flashes of awe, and beauties unseen.